Oracle Gets Bigger in Database Market, Others Hang On

05-05-08 16:44

Of the big three, Microsoft proved to be the only one experiencing growth under the market average, 11.2%, for revenue of $3.4 billion and an 18.3% market share, IDC said. 

Oracle’s relational database revenue grew at 13% to $8.2 billion, that is, 44.1% of the total market. In comparison to the 43.7% of the market it held in 2006.

IBM's revenue grew at a rate of 13.3% slightly faster yet still shoring them up in second place. Its DB2 and Informix systems produced $3.95 billion in revenue, that is, 21.3% of the 2007 market.

In total the relational database market grew 12.1% from $16.6 billion in 2006 to $18.6 billion in 2007. 

Oracle continues to increase its share in the database market, despite not so favourable predictions in recent years foretelling it to level off as a revenue generator. Microsoft and Oracle for the past three years have been competing to gain database users, and Oracle has lowered prices and offered an entry-level, free version, Oracle Express, to combat SQL Server.  

IDC said "that Oracle 11g has experienced unusually high early adoption rates for a major release, probably due to demand for some of its new features".

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